POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Many people reading this are no doubt familiar with the web site
fivethirtyeight.com (“538 dot com” — 538 was the number of
electoral college votes needed to win the presidential election).
This is where Nate Silver — a master statistician — publishes
his analyses of political polls and other statistics. His reports
leading up to the presidential election were remarkable and
extremely accurate and well-informed.
Recently, he published an analysis
(http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/special-interest-money-means-longer.html)
of how effective insurance company contributions were in
determining the position of a Senator or Representative on the
“public option”. It’s an interesting article, and he is careful
to point out that there are other factors than money involved; he
mentions ideology as particularly important. But among other
things, he says:
*) … the insurance industry’s influence appears to swing about
9 votes against the public option.
*) … if a mainline Democrat has received $60,000 from insurance
PACs over the past six years, his likelihood of supporting the
public option is cut roughly in half from 80 percent to 40
percent.
I can’t evaluate the first of these two statements. It may well
be right. But I’m sure that the second statement, while
technically correct, is quite misleading.
I have two quick reasons for saying this, and a larger reason
that I think illuminates the issue as a whole. First, the two
quick reasons:
1. As I’ve read now in many email messages, the insurance
companies and their allies are spending more than $1.4 million a
day against the public option. Based on what we know (for
instance, based on the figures in Nate Silver’s article),
relatively little of this is winding up in the hands of our
national legislators. Where is it going? Keep reading, and
thank you for asking.
2. Based on Nate’s second statement above, one might figure that
for slightly over $60,000 per vote (even make it $120,000, say),
we could ourselves get 9 more votes for the public option. But
no one thinks that. If that were true, there are all sorts of
organizations — MoveOn, for instance — that could raise that
kind of money in a day. But they’re not even asking for it.
What are they raising money for? For ads. I think they know
what they’re doing.
WHAT POLITICAL LEADERS LOOK FOR
What motivates politicians? Lots of things, to be sure, but
certainly getting elected and re-elected has to be way up there.
So politicians pay a lot of attention to what their constituents
feel deeply about. And if you get the same emails that I’ve been
getting, you know that recently a number of members of Congress
have changed their positions — from being against single-payer
universal health care (or a robust “public option”) to being for
it. In every case this happened because it became clear to them
that their constituents demanded it.
But determining this is not always a simple matter. Poll after
poll has shown that the vast majority of people, all over the
country, are in favor of single-payer health care. And yet most
politicians have yet to endorse it. How can this be? If polls
show that people want single-payer health care, and if
politicians generally aren’t getting paid to vote against it, why
aren’t more of them for it?
I think the answer is twofold:
1. They don’t think that the support for single-payer health
care is “hard”.
2. They are afraid.
Many of them perceive that the support for single-payer health
care is similar to the support for public education. Here again,
poll after poll has shown that most people want better schools,
and even say they would be willing to pay higher taxes to get
better schools. The trouble is they don’t vote that way.
And no politician wants to be hung out to dry. No politician
wants to propose higher taxes for public education and then
suddenly be confronted in the next election by a well-funded
opponent swamping the airwaves with ads accusing him or her of
“squandering” our “hard-earned tax dollars” on “the teachers
unions” — with no one willing to step up in defense of
supporting education. Similarly, no politician wants to be
hammered for setting up “yet another government bureaucracy to
waste our money mismanaging health care”.
CYNICISM AND THE POLITICAL CLIMATE
People have mixed feelings and opinions on all these big issues.
And what keeps many people from holding a “hard” position in
favor of single-payer universal health care is a set of cynical
ideas about government programs:
a) The government is wasteful. It can’t do anything efficiently.
b) Government programs just tie you up in red tape.
c) When the government runs something you have to wait forever to
get anything done.
d) The government takes your money and gives it to people with
political connections, or to “big labor”.
e) Most government employees are lazy and don’t care about doing
a good job.
Although it’s actually pretty easy — and even fun — to show
that each of these assertions is wrong, we have by and large
failed to do this. And as a result, these notions are deeply
embedded in our political culture. Ronald Reagan for instance,
built a whole political career out of this kind of talk.
Everyone remembers these famous lines:
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.
Or
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m
from the government and I’m here to help.”
These cynical ideas — repeated every day on talk shows and
rarely challenged — constitute the soil in which lies and
disinformation about single-payer health care can grow.
APPEALS TO CYNICISM — APPEALS TO FEAR
These cynical ideas are not an accident. They are actively
cultivated by Republicans and “conservatives” generally, and are
the primary way in which opposition to single-payer universal
health care is framed.
Remember how the Clinton health-care initiative was derailed? It
was largely by way of the “Harry and Louise” ads. Those ads
contained no information at all. They contained lies (“the
government will tell us what doctor we have to go to”), and
appealed directly to cynicism about government. Those ads cost a
lot of money. That money came from insurance companies. Those
companies didn’t go out buying votes in Congress. They went
directly to the voters.
To the extent that people can overcome this cynicism, they will
be able to convey forcefully to political leaders that
single-payer health care is what we all want. And when voters do
that, all the insurance company lobbying in the world will have
little effect. It’s only when politicians sense that the voters
are pretty confused that insurance companies and their lobbyists
can wield great power — and they only do that by appealing to
the fear that every politician has of being hung out to dry.
With very few exceptions, the problem is not that otherwise
progressive politicians are bought off — it’s that they are
afraid.
WHAT DO WE SAY TO PEOPLE?
I didn’t write this as an abstract exercise. What I’m trying to
understand is how best to talk to people about single-payer
universal health care. And I think that based on the analysis
I’ve outlined above, there are some conclusions that can be
drawn:
1. It is a mistake to talk about how politicians are being
bought by the insurance companies. This is for two reasons:
a) The money most politicians get from the insurance companies
is minor.
b) In any case, even if we could show that they were getting
a lot of money from the insurance companies, this would not
change many people’s minds. If what’s really holding people
back is cynical notions that are floating around in their
minds, then it is that cynicism that has to be confronted.
2. So we need to confront that cynicism. We need to do it
directly. We need to name it. We need to talk about the Reagan
quotes and the other commonplace observations that “everyone
knows” and that talk-show hosts hammer away at, and that are just
wrong. And we need to talk about how the insurance companies are
spending huge amounts of money to instill these cynical notions
in people, in order to protect their profits.
That, I think is a good way to address this issue.
–Carl Offner
